“We had to jettison more of the food and medical supplies and even most of the guns and flechette ammunition to make up for the extra weight,” Hannah said sheepishly. “And we had to land three more times to work on it. But it finally got us here.”
“How did its navigation system know how to find Ardis?” asked Casman. The thin, bearded Ardis survivor had always been interested in machinery.
Hannah laughed. “It didn’t. It could barely find what Odysseus calls North America. He guided us here—Odysseus—following first one big river he calls the Mississippi, and then our own Ardis River, which he called the Leanoka or Ohio. And then we saw your fire.”
“You flew on at night?” asked Ada.
“We had to. There were too many dinosaurs and sabertooths down in the forests south of here to risk landing for very long. We all took turns helping fly the thing while Odysseus caught naps. But he’s been awake for most of seventy-two hours.”
“He looks… well again,” said Ada.
Hannah nodded. “The recovery crèche healed most of the wounds the voynix inflicted on him. We were right to bring him back to the Bridge. He would have died otherwise.”
Ada was silent a minute, thinking of how that decision had taken Harman from her.
As if reading her friend’s mind, Hannah said, “We looked for Harman, Ada. Even though Odysseus was sure that Ariel had quantum teleported him somewhere—that’s like faxing, only more powerful somehow, it’s what the gods did in the turin drama—even though Odysseus was sure that the Ariel-thing had QT’d him far away, we flew down and searched the old Machu Picchu ruins below the Golden Gate and even looked along the nearby rivers and waterfalls and valleys. There was no sign of Harman.”
“He’s still alive,” Ada said simply. She touched her swollen belly as she said this. She always did—it was not only a part of her connection to Harman, but it seemed to confirm that her intuitive feeling was accurate. It was almost as if Ada’s unborn child knew that Harman still lived… somewhere.
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“Did you see any other faxnode communities?” asked Loes. “Any other survivors?”
Hannah shook her head. Ada noticed that her young friend’s always-short hair had grown out some. “We stopped at two other nodes between Hughes Town and Ardis,” said Hannah. “Small-population nodes—Live Oak and Hulmanica. They’d both been sacked by voynix—there were voynix carcasses and human bones left, nothing more.”
“How many people do you think died there?” Ada asked softly.
Hannah shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. “No more than forty or fifty total,” she said with the unemotional lack of affect common to all the Ardis survivors. “Nothing like the disaster here.” Hannah looked around. “I can feel something scrabbling at my mind like a bad memory.”
“That’s the little Setebos,” said Ada. “It wants to get in our minds and out of its Pit.” She always thought of the thing’s hole as “the Pit” with a capital “P.”
“Aren’t you afraid that its mother—father—whatever that thing in Paris Crater was that Daeman saw, will come for it?”
Ada looked over to where Daeman was standing by the Pit, speaking earnestly to Noman. “The big Setebos hasn’t showed up yet,” she said. “We’re more worried about what the little one will do.” She described to them all how the many-handed thing seemed to suck energy out of the earth where someone had died horribly.
Hannah shivered even though the sunlight was stronger now. “We saw the voynix in the woods with our searchlight,” she said softly. “Countless numbers of them. Row upon row of them. Just standing there under the trees and along the ridgelines, the closest about two miles out, I think. What are you going to do?”
Ada told her about the plan for the island.
Elian cleared his throat again. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s not my business and I know I don’t get a vote here, but it seems to me that a rocky island like that would put you in our position in the tower. The voynix would keep coming—and you have so many more around you here—and you’d die off one by one. Someplace like the Bridge that Hannah told us about seems to make more sense.”
Ada nodded. She didn’t want to argue strategies quite yet—too many of the listening Ardis survivors sitting around this circle would vote for the island. “You do get a vote here, Elian,” she said instead. “Every one of you does. You’re part of our community now—any refugee we find will be—and you get as much of a vote as I do. Thank you for your opinion. We’re all going to discuss this at the noon meal and even the sentries will vote by proxy. I think you should get some sleep before then.”
Elian, Beman, the blond Iyayi—who somehow had remained beautiful despite her scratches and rags—and the short, silent woman named Susan and the big, bearded man named Stefe nodded and moved off with Tom and Siris to find empty bedrolls under canvas somewhere.
“You should sleep, too,” Ada said, touching Hannah’s forearm.
“What happened to your wrist, Ada?”
Ada looked down at the rough plaster cast and grubby bandage. “I broke it during the fight here. It’s nothing. I’m interested that the voynix disappeared from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. It makes me think we’re fighting a finite number of the things… if they have to redeploy, I mean.”
“A finite number,” agreed Hannah. “But Odysseus thinks there are more than a million voynix, and fewer than a hundred thousand of us humans.” She thought a second and added, “A hundred thousand of us before the slaughters began.”
“Does Noman have any idea why the voynix are killing us?” asked Ada, holding Hannah’s strong hand now.
“I think he does, but he hasn’t told me,” said Hannah. “There’s a lot he keeps to himself.”
That’s the understatement of the Twenty, thought Ada. Aloud she said, “You look exhausted, my dear. You really should get some sleep.”
“When Odysseus does,” said Hannah, meeting Ada’s gaze with something like the bashfulness, defiance, and pride of a young lover.
Ada nodded again.
Daeman stepped up to the fire. “Ada, could we see you a minute?”
Touching Hannah’s shoulder, Ada rose awkwardly and followed Daeman back to the Pit where Noman stood. The man they’d once called Odysseus was not much taller than Ada, but he was so solid and muscular that he emanated power. Ada could see the curly gray hairs on his chest through the open tunic.
“Admiring our pet?” asked Ada.
Noman did not smile. He scratched his beard, looked down into the Pit at the strangely quiescent baby, and then returned his dark-eyed gaze to Ada. “You’ll have to kill it,” he said.
“We plan to.”
“I mean quickly,” said Noman/Odysseus. “These things aren’t so much babies of the real Setebos as lice.”
“Lice?” Ada said. “I can hear its thoughts…”
“And you’ll hear them more and more loudly until the thing comes up out of there—it probably could already if it wanted to—and sucks the energy and souls right out of your bodies.”
Ada blinked and looked down into the Pit. The baby’s twohemisphered brain-back was just a gray glow down there. It was on the floor of the Pit now, tendrils and hands reeled in, its motile hands tucked under its mucousy body, its many eyes closed.